Have you seen City of Lost Children? Or Army of Darkness? The jilted camera angles, the quirky dialog deliveries, the strange feel of it all... If you were to describe great acting and directing, by all accounts that would not be it. But it is exactly that slightly odd quality that makes them so fascinating to watch. Jack Nicholson wouldn't be such an engaging actor if he didn't have such a strange way of putting spaces and emphasis in the wrong place in his lines. Just a little bit of quirkiness, in other words, is endlessly entertaining.

Staying quirky can be tough in any project, as the natural instinct is to smooth everything. But staying quirky on a project of over a hundred people, all with a say in the final outcome, is downright daunting. You just don't get that individual personality by group consensus. I remember going over tutorial scripts line-by-line in a committee, and watching them degrade from interestingly townie English with a thick lower-middle class accent to something more straight and bland. Thankfully we threw out that draft very early on, but you get the point.

I feel pretty proud that we managed to keep a lot of the good quirks in Rockband. For example, early on there was a bug where you could see the arena behind the tracks. We were going to fix the problem, but we liked it so much we decided to run with it. Similarly, instead of modeling faces that matched normal ones perfectly, or people with regular people proportions, we worked very hard to create this strange and interesting look to all of the characters. They're not quite cartoony, but they're not quite played straight either.

You have to keep a lot of your game straightforward in order to ground the experience. But keeping just the right level of quirkiness can really bring forth the flavor of a title.